Thursday, September 17, 2009

Developer buying Marshall Hotel

2009 Presidio Co., proposal

Bob Shallit reporting today that the Marshall Hotel at 7th & L St. has a buyer and plans to build a 14 story "W"-style boutique hotel in the future. The plan is to get all needed entitlements lined up so that it will be shovel-ready when the times right to start building. As seen in the posted renderings above, the plans call for retaining two exterior sides of the 98-year-old, five-story Marshall building and incorporating them into a stepped, 14-story structure.

2007 Grand Heritage Group proposal

I love the idea of combining the old building with a new structure so that the project becomes feasible to build, but these renderings make the tower addition look tacky without even tiring to blend the old and new structure. The developer Presidio Co., need to take a queue from the previous Grand Heritage Group proposal of 2007 who proposed a similar concept but did a much nicer job designing the tower addition. The 2007 proposal fell through because of the credit crunch, but their execution to blend old with new was excellent.

4 comments:

See! Now that's what I mean. Sac needs character and by that I mean older looking buildings."Gothom" like buildings. It does need a little more blending though. It looks a little tacky, the bottom rendering looks better than the first. That's going to be a cool looking hotel.

Very interesting to see two schools of thought applied to the same project here. The 2007 proposal takes the very American approach of creating the image of an idealized past by making the new building look old as if it were always there. The latest one reminds me of what is usually done in Europe, where they contrast the new with the old to be clear as to which is which. I won't say either approach is wrong but my bias leans toward the 2009 proposal because I feel it is more honest and doesn't confuse the historic value of the old building.

becks88208: Rather than building "older looking" buildings, Sacramento needs to preserve the handful of older buildings that haven't been demolished yet. Old buildings (even side-by-side with new buildings) give a city its character in a way that new buildings can't.

I am not a fad of facadism, but this project at least proposes to use the hollowed-out husk of the Clayton/Marshall as a hotel (its historic role) rather than flatten it entirely, or as the dead facade of a parking garage. In a perfect world I'd rather see a restoration of the building (things like preservation tax credits can make such projects more practical) but we'll see what happens when the rubber hits the road.

I am curious how this new hotel project will come into conflict with the other hotel proposals at 8th & K and 10th & K. I suppose I'm a little dismayed about yet another project that includes no housing--sure, housing isn't practical right now, but neither are high-end hotels, and most developers have already made clear that these projects are being put forth for entitlements only, and won't be built until the market changes. So why not plan for what we'll really need in the long run--more housing opportunities in the central business district?